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Majestic appoints new head buyer
Majestic has promoted its senior buyer Cat Lomax to head up its wine buying across the group, following the departure of Matt Pymm.
Lomax, who was named DB’s Young Achiever of the Year 2011, joined the company as senior buyer from Waitrose last September and previously spent five years at Direct Wines as a buyer.
As part of the new role, she will oversee Majestic’s own-label wines, including Definition and the new Majestic Loves entry-level range, which she helped to create, and its focus on small parcel wines. In addition, she will continue to buy wines for New Zealand, Burgundy, Champagne and Beaujolais, and the USA.
Buying & merchandising director Richard Weaver said he was delighted at the “ideal” appointment.
“We’re building an exciting, dynamic buying team at Majestic and it will be great to have Cat at the helm,” he said. “She has been instrumental over the last year in overseeing our biggest categories, introducing our most successful Parcels and WIGIGs and revamping many of our key ranges.”
The wine retailer has also recently boosted the responsibilities of Weaver and operations director Rob Farnworth to support the Group CEO and Retail MD Rowan Gormley following the departure of John Colley in May.
The first thing Majestic needs to do is ease up on the press releases. Firing out 5 a day is Rowen Gormley’s style but for a plc it is not appropriate. He is sending out a release saying someone is promoted and next week sending out a release that they have left. And sending out press releases saying they are going to “improve the website” risks looking desperate. Which going is not planning to improve its website? All this chaos has driven the share price down substantially in the last couple of weeks. I think questions will start to be asked by the large shareholders about what is going on. It is becoming clearer very the Chairman is jumping too.